Julian Assange wants to run for office
Source: Salon
The Wikileaks founder plans to form a party and run for the Australian Senate next year
BY NATASHA LENNARD
According to Australian news sources, Julian Assange plans to run for a seat in the Australian Senate in 2013 under the banner of the “WikilLeaks Party.” News site The Age reported that Assange has said plans for registering the party were “significantly advanced” and that “a number of very worthy people admired by the Australian public” have expressed interest in standing on the WikiLeaks ticket.
Unsurprisingly, Assange said the party platform would push for greater government transparency and against creeping intrusions on individual privacy. “Polls inside Australia show that Assange could conceivably stand a chance of winning in either New South Wales or Victoria,” The Age noted.
Meanwhile, Assange himself who hopes to run for a Senate seat remains confined within the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The WikiLeaks founder faces extradition to Sweden over rape allegations but has been granted political asylum by Ecuador — he has not been able to leave his London hideout for fear of interception by the British authorities who have vowed to deliver the controversial figure to Sweden. The Age noted that Assange’s circumstance would not necessarily hinder his Senate run: “If Mr Assange were elected but he was unable to return to Australia to take up his position, a nominee would occupy a Senate seat.”
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Read more: http://www.salon.com/2012/12/12/julian_assange_wants_to_run_for_office/
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A U.S. military judge just censored defendant testimony about torture in Guantanamo.
Our whole government is this way--from the "forgetting" of massive known crimes by the Bush Junta principles and no doubt cover up of many, likely even worse, unknown crimes, to WHO is conducting summary executions via drones of "suspected" terrorists and non-involved persons ("collateral damage"
in our name and with our tax money--the secrecy is pervasive and immensely destructive of democracy. And that is not even to mention the money corruption--the corporate lobbyists writing our laws, the billions in secret campaign funds, the army of private corporate 'contractors' in Washington sucking the lifeblood out of government coffers, and on and on.
Time to air it all out and detach our government from the bloodsuckers. Australian governments, from John Majors and the Bushwhacks, to now, have been very collusive with the U.S. government and its corporate rulers and war profiteers. Australia--which apparently still has transparent vote counting (an essential of democracy that we have been robbed of)--is a good place to start this discussion and the renewal of democracy that it could be the preliminary to.
I hope that Assange succeeds in winning an Australian senate seat. I don't for a minute believe that he is a rapist or abuser of any kind. These allegations smell to high heaven--and he furthermore has repeatedly made himself available to Swedish authorities to answer their questions and they have repeatedly refused to question him! In fact, the first prosecutor thought that the allegations were so flimsy he dropped the case and told Assange he could leave the country. Then another prosecutor took over in an obviously political revival of these charges because only by doing so could they get Assange into custody. It's very clear that they don't give a crap about these absurd allegations and their only goal is to get Assange into their clutches so that they can turn him over to the U.S. for burial in some dungeon like Bradley Manning.
Assange is a threat to the secrets of every U.S.-collusive government on earth. Collusion on torturing prisoners. Collusion on execution without trial. Collusion on slaughtering a hundred thousand innocent people in the first weeks of bombing alone, in Iraq, and the on-going carnage in Afghanistan, and the disastrous mayhem in Libya and Syria. Collusion on drone spying and drone assassinations. Collusion on transglobal bankster looting. Collusion on the rich getting richer while the poor are kicked off the island. Collusion on the corrupt, murderous, failed "war on drugs"--failed as to its stated purpose but not failed as to brutally driving FIVE MILLION peasant farmers from their lands in Colombia, as prep for U.S.-dominated "free trade for the rich." Collusion on outsourcing jobs from countries with unions to countries where workers have no rights at all. Collusion on the corporate-caused death of the very planet we live on. Collusion that goes all the way back to the Vietnam War.
And the collusion has just gotten thicker and worse and more secretive over the decades. And Australian politicians, war profiteers and monopolistic corporate greedbags have been right there in the middle of all this murder and greed--playing along, supporting it, getting little scraps from the Masters' table in return. Accountability could start in a number of places--it is well under way in South America--but, aside from England, Australia is a prime venue to start the Great Cleansing and there is no better person to start it, in the English-speaking world, than Julian Assange. He has been smeared, slandered, hunted and robbed, in order to shut him up. He has a lot to tell Australians and the rest of us about the evils of secret government not the least of which is their egregious hypocrisy about "free speech."
